It’s a Mystery: “Unless you sample life’s dangers you shall never know its mysteries”
/A Legacy of Spies
By John le CarréViking, 2017Glass HousesBy Louise PennyMinotaur, 2017John le Carré just gets better—which should be impossible because he is already the best there is in the proliferating field of spy novels. They run the gamut from top notch to mediocre but none can hold a candle, as they say. A Legacy of Spies, his latest, marks the return of George Smiley, last seen in 1991’s The Secret Pilgrim. Smiley is le Carré’s renowned, inimitable, incongruous superspy whose demeanor belies his tradecraft. He is described by his wife (the stunningly beautiful Lady Ann Sercomb) in the opening of the first le Carré novel, A Call for the Dead (1961), as “breathtakingly ordinary”:
Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.
And in le Carré’s second, A Murder of Quality (1962), he’s characterized thus:
Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed.
Demeanor aside, the Smiley of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the best of the Smiley novels, gives us the quintessential Smiley. It is also one of two novels that le Carré spins into the story line of A Legacy of Spies. The other is The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Tinker’s plot revolves around indisputable evidence beyond all question that somewhere at the very highest levels of British Intelligence there is a double agent—a mole implanted deep in its fabric, perhaps decades ago, by the KGB. George Smiley is tapped to dig out the mole. “You’ll take the job, clean the stables?” the man from Whitehall says to him. “Go backwards, go forwards, do whatever is necessary.”A Legacy of Spies brings back Smiley as éminence grise in the narrative. It is Peter Guillam, Smiley’s chief lieutenant from MI6, his most trusted colleague that takes center stage. Guillam has an extraordinarily diverse background that includes heading the “Scalphunters”, the division of the Circus (Headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service) responsible for espionage operations requiring violence or assassination.As the book opens, Guillam’s retirement in Brittany is interrupted by a summons from London and the Circus.
…A matter in which you played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head, and I have no option but to ask you to make yourself available in London as soon as possible to assist us in preparing a response…I have to stress that the matter is of some urgency. Allow me in closing to draw your attention to Paragraph 14 of your termination agreement.Yours sincerely,A Butterfield(LA to CS)
For Peter Guillam, out to grass for many years and grateful for it, reading between the lines arouses his somewhat dormant but deeply ingrained spook’s instincts.
For ‘LA to CS’ read Legal Adviser to Chief of Service. For ‘Paragraph 14’ read lifelong duty to attend, should Circus needs dictate. And for ‘allow me to remind you’ read just remember who pays your pension.
Butterfield, the Service’s chief lawyer, turns out to be an overbearingly cheerful bespectacled boy/man of indeterminate age. He introduces himself as Bunny: “Bloody silly name, but it’s followed me around since infancy and I can’t get rid of it.”Guillam, who has spent the last hour cooling his heels in a cubicle reliving every misstep in a “lifetime of skullduggery,” bypasses any sane rejoinder. After all, he has spent his entire career trying—if not always succeeding—to follow Shakespeare’s advice: discretion is the better part of valor. The “matter” very much at hand in which Guillam played a significant role is Operation Windfall.This takes us back to le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, where the events of Windfall were detailed. Considered by le Carré to be his best book, it is, I would submit, a crucial introduction to le Carré’s cool moral universe. The Spy is centered on the character of Alec Leamas, a fifty-year-old agent who wishes to retire from active duties but is persuaded to stay out in the cold a little longer. The assignment: pretend to defect to the East and give false information to the East Germans in order to implicate one of the highest ranking officials in the East German Intelligence Service. But it all goes grotesquely awry. Leamas learns that the information he has supplied has framed one official while protecting the identity of the real British spy. And, in the end, he and his lover Liz Gold, the real innocent in all this, lose their lives. In an unforgettable scene, she is shot as she tries to climb the Berlin Wall and a distraught Leamas chooses to die with her.The cause for Bunny’s concern—and he is but one of several ass-covering lackeys poised to put Guillam through the ringer—is the threat of legal action from the children of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold. It is with consummate skill that Guillam takes them through the past and a false version of Windfall and its aftermath. It is left for him to agonize over the real version.The takeaway here, the ultimate, enduring conundrum for Guillam with more than a nod to his mentor, Smiley: “How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?”And one last bon mot from le Carré that caps it all: “It’s a matter of pride to me that nobody who knows the reality has so far accused me of revealing it.”
Glass Houses is the 13th in Louise Penny’s compelling Armand Gamache series (after 2016’s A Great Reckoning). Gamache and his beloved wife Reine-Marie now reside permanently in Three Pines, the idyllic village just over the Canadian border. It’s the perfect place to retire and it might even be time—for someone else. Retirement is not in Gamache’s vocabulary or his nature. He can’t stay out of the limelight. He’s back at the Sûreté du Quebec as Chief Superintendent. What he soon discovers, is that the Sûreté is no longer the strong police force it once was. It has been infiltrated by the all-powerful drug cartels that are now in full control:
It was immediately obvious that the degree of crime was far worse than even he had imagined…. And what drove the gathering chaos was the drug trade.The cartels.From there sprang most of the other ills. The murders, the assaults. Money laundering. Extortion….The inner cities were already infected. But it wasn’t confined there. The rot was spreading into the countryside.
But Gamache, true to form, hatches an audacious scheme that will either decapitate the cartel monster or send the chief to jail.As the novel opens, it is a sweltering July day and Gamache is in the witness box at a murder trial in a Montreal courtroom. With a calm that conceals his inner angst, he is recounting the story of a dark, still figure, wearing long black robes, a mask, and a hood that first appeared at the annual Halloween party which took place at the beginning of November.By next day, the robed figure had taken up residence on the village green where it stood immobile, menacing and unresponsive to any attempts at conversation. One of the guests at the local B&B, a journalist, says that the figure reminds him of a story he did on an old Spanish tradition: that of the cobrador del frac or “debt collector”. Gamache dispatches his son-in-law and second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, to research the “dark thing’s” back story. He finds that the debt it collects is moral. It takes away your reputation and your good name.All of this is relevant to the trial because the murder victim was found in the basement of the local church in the outfit of the figure on the green. As Gamache testifies about the events leading up to the murder, he explains how the masked man grew from a fixture into an omen:
It had been there for almost forty-eight hours, and the villagers, far from getting used to it, were growing more and more stressed. Nerves had begun to fray…The courtroom clock ticked past five….But there was one more question to be asked and answered.‘Chief Superintendent Gamache,” said the Crown….His voice was quiet, grave. “From what Inspector Beauvoir found out about the cobrador, did you come to any conclusion?”“I did.”“And what was that?”“That someone in the village had done something so horrific that a conscience had been called.”
Conscience is the dominant theme of the novel. It is guilt that led to a murder that had a disastrous ripple effect on many lives. It is Gamache’s own as he confronts the terrifying consequences of his plan to destroy the cartel. It depends on waiting the bad guys out, lulling them into complacency by ignoring their most blatant acts. Creating more addicts in order to destroy what fuels them. It strains Gamache’s hand-picked, closely knit team almost to the breaking point.Glass Houses is an utterly gripping novel that meticulously explores in all its ramifications a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
